They're a bunch of jerks.

Herein lieth the lesson: don’t be a stupid bitch.

Territorialism. I understand it. I get it. I like my own space. I don’t like it when people mess with my stuff. That’s pretty natural I think.

But sometimes it can be taken a little too far. To get an idea of what I’m talking about please see this note from a co-worker of mine:

For a bit of context, I work Thur-Fri in this office and she works Mon-Wed. When I am in the office I use her chair because all the other chairs are really quite terrible. Ignoring the fact that I always adjust her chair back to maximum height (which is how she always has it), even if I didn’t, she’d only have to adjust it back once a week.

I can see how this would be such a huge problem, though. The only thing I like to do once a week is get drunk and amuse my friends with my scintillating anecdotes. I mean…they don’t pick up the phone or anything but I always make sure to leave them a voicemail telling them about my latest adventure up the shops, or about that dog I saw at the park once and how it had these funny looking ears. They love that one. And I love telling it.

Maybe she just has an intolerance for doing anything once a week. No matter how minor. I mean, maybe she has to put her bins out twice weekly because once just irks her.

Or maybe she knows something about the lever on the side of the chair that I don’t. Is it like the movie ‘The Box’, where if you pull the lever someone in the world will die? Is it a magic lever? Does it make her astral project? Does it drain away a year of your life each time you touch it? Is it a portkey and each time she uses it she ends up battling Voldemort for her life? Was she mugged by a lever once and now levers trigger some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?

I mean, I assume it must be something like that because (as her suggestion for me to use someone else’s chair implies) she doesn’t seem to have some staunch principle against chair sharing. Or maybe she’s ok with other people being inconvenienced, as long as it’s not her.

Now, I could stop using her chair. I could. Except the other chairs in the office are genuinely horrible to sit on and I have back problems. Also she didn’t use the magic word. So fuck it.

I did try to phrase my refusal as civilly as possible when really I was muttering things to myself along the lines of: “Are you fucking kidding me?”, “What the fuck.” and other things that might have involved the words ‘uptight’ and ‘bitch’. I think I only partly succeeded considering the violently disparate size of my writing throughout my note:

2 Comments on “Herein lieth the lesson: don’t be a stupid bitch.”

In regards to the notes and such, I know back in America if you do what she was doing with the notes it can be seen as a form of harassment and being a note it is documented so if the same is true in Oz it may be best for you to not give notes in return.